EU Enlargement and Ontological (in)security
EU Enlargement and Ontological (in)security

Author: Aleksandar Jekic

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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The thesis deals with the enlargement framework of the European Union as a potential source of ontological insecurity in the case of North Macedonia. It does so by analysing the emergence and development of the Macedonian identity to understand which elements of the social and material environment constitute the Macedonian identity and in turn act as a source of ontological security. The latter is then applied on two critical situations, namely the Bulgarian veto to Macedonian accession negotiations in 2020 and the French proposal for resolving the dispute between Bulgaria and North Macedonia in 2022. This is achieved by employing a qualitative content analysis of 59 text units that were authored by members of Macedonian parliamentary parties in the period between the announcement of the Bulgarian veto in September 2020 and the acceptance of the French proposal in July 2022. The analysis shows that the initially divergent views on the Bulgarian veto in 2020 developed into a common threat perception across party lines. Moreover, it resulted in a common countermeasure in form of a parliamentary resolution that defined the state position of NM for the ongoing negotiations, constraining the ability on negotiating topics related to the Macedonian identity. With the French proposal, the perceptions between government and opposition started to differ significantly. Thereby, it is shown that EU enlargement can both serve as source of ontological security and insecurity. While governmental parties see EU membership as a protection of the Macedonian identity, the opposition connects the current enlargement framework to the disappearance of the own identity. The thesis, therefore, illustrates how an accession process can become deadlocked due to ontological insecurity, meaning that the current enlargement framework lacks a sufficient understanding of the impact of identity concerns within the accession process.

Ontological Security in International Relations
Ontological Security in International Relations

Author: Brent J. Steele

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-03-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 113598008X

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The central assertion of this book is that states pursue social actions to serve self-identity needs, even when these actions compromise their physical existence. Three forms of social action, sometimes referred to as ‘motives’ of state behaviour (moral, humanitarian, and honour-driven) are analyzed here through an ontological security approach. Brent J. Steele develops an account of social action which interprets these behaviours as fulfilling a nation-state's drive to secure self-identity through time. The anxiety which consumes all social agents motivates them to secure their sense of being, and thus he posits that transformational possibilities exist in the ‘Self’ of a nation-state. The volume consequently both challenges and complements realist, liberal, constructivist and post-structural accounts to international politics. Using ontological security to interpret three cases - British neutrality during the American Civil War (1861-1865), Belgium’s decision to fight Germany in 1914, and NATO’s (1999) Kosovo intervention - the book concludes by discussing the importance for self-interrogation in both the study and practice of international relations. Ontological Security in International Relations will be of particular interest to students and researchers of international politics, international ethics, international relations and security studies.

Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security
Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security

Author: Bahar Rumelili

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-17

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1317750160

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This volume highlights the ways in which the prospect of peace can generate anxieties and consequently set in motion social and political processes that reproduce and reactivate conflicts. In analysing this issue, the volume builds on the notion of ontological security and its recent applications to international relations theory. Although conflicts threaten the physical security of the parties involved, they also help settle existential questions about basic parameters of life, being, and identity, and thus over time become sources of ontological security. The prospect of peace, through the resolution or transformation of conflict, threatens to unsettle the stability and consistency of self-narratives, and their associated routines and habits at the individual, group, and state levels. The contributors argue two key points: 1) that ontological insecurity may set in motion political and social processes that reproduce and reactivate conflicts; 2) that coping with peace anxieties necessitates the formulation of alternative self-narratives at the individual, societal, and state levels that re-situate the Self in relation to Other and to the world at large. Consequently, the book analyses the ways in which, and the conditions under which, conflict resolution induces ontological insecurity, and the different ways in which ontological insecurity has prevented the successful culmination of peace processes in different conflict contexts, including Cyprus, Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, conflict resolution, peace and conflict studies, social theory and IR in general.

Constructing Europe's Identity
Constructing Europe's Identity

Author: Lars-Erik Cederman

Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781555878726

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The authors assess not only the benefits, but also the costs of attempts to assert a European identity. Referring to debates about the respective merits of deepening and widening, they address the equally important associated tradeoffs between exclusion and dilution: they point to the risks on the one hand of a Europe that excludes foreign goods, immigrants and entire countries, and on the other of an unfocused definition of Europe that may dilute the very values that a "European identity" is intended to protect.

Ontological Insecurity in the European Union
Ontological Insecurity in the European Union

Author: Catarina Kinnvall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-21

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0429559402

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The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans. This comprehensive volume explores the concept of ‘ontological security’ which was introduced into international relations over a decade ago to better understand the ‘security of being’ found in feelings of fear, anxiety, crisis, and threat to wellbeing. The authors make use of this concept to explore how narratives of European integration have been part of public discourses in the post-war period and how reconciliation dynamics, national biographical narratives and memory politics have been enacted to create ontological security. Within this context, they also discuss the anxiety of the ‘remainers’ in the Brexit referendum and the consequences of its failure to address the ontological anxieties and insecurities of remain voters. The book also explores: how European security firms market ontological security and provide an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU’s relations with post-communist states; the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats; and the EU as an anxious community. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal European Security.

Identity, Ontological Security and Europeanisation in Republika Srpska
Identity, Ontological Security and Europeanisation in Republika Srpska

Author: Faris Kočan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 303146169X

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This book discusses the impact of the process of accession to the European Union (EU) – i.e. Europeanisation – on the formulation of the ethnic identity of Bosnian Serbs and the political identity of Republika Srpska (RS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The centrepiece of the book is an examination of how it is possible that the expected effect of Europeanisation on ethnic identities in a post-conflict environment – a transformation of ethnic identities through desecuritisation – does not materialise in the case of BiH and the RS. The book starts from the assumption that the political elite in the RS uses Europeanisation as a context for the securitization of two sources of threats – the internal and external Other. This prevents the transformation of ethnic identities in BiH, and as a result also the desecuritisation of antagonisms among the ethnic groups of BiH. The results show that any attempt at a more active engagement by the EU and international community was interpreted by the RS political elite as Bosniak agenda aimed against the RS. In this respect, the book demonstrates that BiH’s EU accession process or a clearer EU perspective alone in scrutinized critical junctures did not outweigh the potential costs for the RS political elite if reforms aimed at creating a more functional BiH were to succeed. In all three analysed critical junctures, the political elite in RS presented motions for a more functional BiH as attempts to centralise the country and framed them as the beginning of the end for the RS as a political entity.

Crisis and Change in Post-Cold War Global Politics
Crisis and Change in Post-Cold War Global Politics

Author: Erica Resende

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-02

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 3319785893

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This volume analyzes crises in International Relations (IR) in an innovative way. Rather than conceptualizing a crisis as something unexpected that has to be managed, the contributors argue that a crisis needs to be analyzed within a wider context of change: when new discourses are formed, communities are (re)built, and new identities emerge. Focusing on Ukraine, the book explore various questions related to crisis and change, including: How are crises culturally and socially constructed? How do issues of agency and structure come into play in Ukraine? Which subjectivities were brought into existence by Ukraine crisis discourses? Chapters explore the participation of women in Euromaidan, identity shifts in the Crimean Tatar community and diaspora politics, discourses related to corruption, anti-Soviet partisan warfare, and the annexation of Crimea, as well as long distance impacts of the crisis.

European Boundaries in Question
European Boundaries in Question

Author: Richard Bellamy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1351268546

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European Union boundaries have always been unusual. In no other political community is both the prospect of enlargement and the ever-present possibility of withdrawal part of the constitutional framework. We find few other instances where some territories in a political community adopt a common currency while others do not. Examples of thick association agreements, such as we find between the EU and third countries like Switzerland and Norway, are uncommon. Over the last number of years, EU boundaries have been challenged like never before. Brexit poses a fundamental threat to the EU’s territorial integrity and the rights of EU citizens to cross what have been regarded as open borders; the refugee crisis and the increase of terrorism both call into question the EU’s ability to justly and effectively manage its external borders; the rise of populism is a direct challenge to internal free movement as the demand to reassert national borders becomes formidable; while the aftermath of the euro-crisis continues to put Monetary Union in doubt. By distinguishing between three categories of boundary change – boundary-making, boundary-crossing and boundary-unbundling – the authors in this volume attempt to shed light on the sustainability and legitimacy of Europe’s boundaries in question. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of European Integration.

Ontological Insecurities and the Politics of Contemporary Populism
Ontological Insecurities and the Politics of Contemporary Populism

Author: Brent J. Steele

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1000885771

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This book explores contemporary populist politics through the lens of ontological security theory. It shows that the 'divisionary politics of populism' is fostered by narratives of crisis and insecurity surrounding the imagined Self that gives shape to 'the people' that populism claims to represent. The loss of faith in mainstream political parties and moderate electoral candidates seems characteristic of the Zeitgeist in much of the Western world and beyond. Politicians and agendas propped up by a discourse that antagonizes established political elites on behalf of a reified, and homogenized people has become a trend in the politics of several countries. This book has brought together a team of worldwide renowned specialists on ontological security to grapple with the contemporary populist challenge through the conceptual lens of ontological security theory. From crises of democracy in the West, to backlashes against democratization in the Global South, this collection not only unveils fundamental structures underpinning these significant and current phenomena. It also provides us with the analytical tools to understand other occurrences of populist politics that are gaining traction across the globe. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in Politics, International Relations and Security. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Regions and Powers
Regions and Powers

Author: Barry Buzan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-12-04

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 9780521891110

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This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.